Okay so first of all, whats the deal with the update server?, as some of you noticed by now, the update cards do nothing, this is because the update service we use has collapsed and not much is clear with wtf is even going on https://hippo-technologies.info/2018/02/14/rackspace-service-issue/, there’s lots of speculations that the company “hippo technologies” is loosing money and bailing out on their web based services and making up lies about their web host “rackspace” having a catastropic server failure (that they do not mention themselves anywhere) as this predatory blog post from their main competitor “casper tech” mentions. https://blog.caspertech.co.uk/the-fall-of-an-empire/
All these assumptions come from a follow up post from Hippo tech https://hippo-technologies.info/2018/02/16/rackspace-cloud-infrastructure-failure/
This post gave me more questions than answers, not much meaningful information was given and they arent being very clear with things. Rackspace is working on rebuilding the database so they arent taking any action yet, so they will later when work is done? but than they are going to step away from those legacy services, so are they going to migrate all the data to their new services or whatever they are doing now? and what the fuck even are those legacy web services? are all their current services like vend and updates and all that shit considered legacy? if so what else does hippo tech even do now that is current and not legacy? do they still have any other web services that they could merge our data with, or will they at least let us migrate to another server before they step away?

So yeah these are the questions, so im going to wait around a little to see if any more information will come out of them, but im not keeping my fingers crossed and will look into better update service alternatives, I will come up with a way and post instructions on how to migrate to a new update service when i have that worked out.

– And now, for the anime heads –

So where am i now with this, i had a few bumps in the road and had to redo the main anime head 2 times but its pretty much final now. Both the Anime and Chibi heads are rigged and unwrapped, i just finished making a bunch of skin and other textures and created a bunch of necks and special textures for those necks to make the heads fit the kemono, av2 and the LL/normie bodies seamlessly, i will make a dev kit for custom skin creators to be able to blend their body skins with the head skin by using a method called baking in blender. The UV maps for both female heads will accept same textures, so there wont be any more confusion like when people used to buy an M3 anime head skin and wonder why it doesnt work on their M3 Venus head, or the other way around, one skin will fit both. Eye textures are still the same as M3 heads, so all the eyes you already have should work right away, Eyelashes will work for the most part too, some might look kinda funky on eye shape B though, but other than that, the texture is the same, and also the blush texture, if anyone ever bothered making mods for that.

The male head still needs textures but the base skin texture is finished, Also gonna make a neck that makes it work with the kuro body.

I ran into a dilemma with the Chibi head, will probably need to redo its shape a little, but the problem is that it doesnt work with half of my hairs, they clip at the sides, also its ear position makes hairs with very specific ear locations look weird, so some kind of a compromise will need to be made. Other than that, everything is pretty much done, now i just need to create a new HUD and all the face animations and hand it all over to Kourtnee for scripting.

Are you a filthy casual? do you have friends and leave the house on friday nights? are you active on facebook? not living with your parents and think anime is gay?

Well than this head is for you!

The normie bento head is the answer to all those overpriced, no mod, weird alien neck mesh heads, that you see on the market. This head Is SLUV/Omega compatible so you have a wide selection of skins, makeup, hair bases and other options. The head is also full mod so you can add those finishing touches.

So i dont have much to show yet but started working on a bento anime head

Still gotta decide on many things like the shape of the eyes and nose, maybe add the option to choose between a few different eyes and noses like you can with the ears, figuring out how to scale and position the head onto the SL avatar’s neck will be tricky too since the head is going to be rigged.

There is also another bento head in the works thats going to be released soon, it was just my bento experiment human head but it looked decent enough to be a product so im in the process of getting it omega applier compatible.

This is the long overdue fitted mesh update as well as bento face and hand rigging. You can now adjust the shape of your ass, belly, legs and feet, to make your shape more juicy. You can also adjust some of the face sliders but not all of them work (not all bento features are supported due to the way the game treats custom joint positions)

– Whats else is New in 1.14 –

In general this was a huge update, avatar 2.0 now partially supports fitted mesh (the whole lower body bellow the waist) as well as bento rigging for the face and hands.
Huge improvements to render weight from 32K to just 4.8K (the render weight randomly fluctuates between higher and lower numbers because the whole render weight system is garbage) as well as script optimizations.
There are now 2 versions of the body, A and B. Version A is the normal version witch is 4.8k render weight, and the experimental version B with 2k render weight witch will not work for people running the game on ghetto graphics settings.
A bunch of new features implemented such as normal/specular map support, head customization options and other neat things.

Rez or wear your Avatar 2.0 update cards to get it.

All the existing clothing have been updated to work with this new version, rez your update cards.

The old versions of following items did not come with all the textures, scripting and update cards, there for they are not eligible for a free update.

Next stop on the to do list is updating the avatar 2.0 appliers to make use of the new texture layers and specular/normal maps, as well as new dummies for content creators.